I was surprised how many "products" presented by Google were merely "concepts" or has a 2023 "estimated" ship date.
That's like car prototypes in car shows: they are not real cars, only concepts and divagations. From a professional point of view, there's not much interest in that comparing to real-new-car launches.
You can't bet on Google effectively delivering the products they announced in Google I/O. Or if they really launch some of them, they can be sunsetted in a really short time, like a coupe of years, or languish without progress like zombies (as Google Travel, comes to my mind).
That's a problem as a user, because Google creates increasing uncertainty over their new products and launches, even with some old ones (like the free Google G Suite under your own domain). And as a developer, it's hard to invest heavily in most of the stuff Google presents.
In contrast, Apple presentations are interesting as a Developer, as any other kind of professional who uses Apple products, or even an average normal person who uses some Apple devices. And they present REAL stuff and when they do present it, it's because they are committed to it.
Well, most of the time.
Exhibit A: AirPower
Exhibit B: AppleScript (after celebrating its 25th and new tech for it the year before)
P.S. and yes, I can keep this up all day, despite all the downvotes by Apple fantrolls.
I'd guess WWDC is more exciting because the stuff presented is instantly relevant in the ecosystem, as majority (?) of the iPhone users will get an update and will benefit from the new APIs etc.
I was gifted a Mobvoi TicWatch 3 GPS and it works well with my Pixel 2. It's my first watch in decades, let alone smart. It's been paramount in my efforts to fight back the gluttony and sedintary lifestyle that snuck in with full-time WFH.
I like the integration with Fit, Maps, and I don't pick my phone up and get distracted along the way just to reply to a few messages. Google Assistant works well. Can take my calls while in the pool with it.
Best gift I didn't know I wanted in a long time.
Your results may vary, I am a simple man.
Have you had the same experience with the Pro 3? I'd be interesting in upgrading if it was better.
Since I'm a full Google boy, I couldn't entertain the idea of trying an Apple Watch even if I wanted.
I didn't search far and wide, so I'm sure - as with everything - people can cherry pick reviews one way or the other. These were the first two I found that weren't "IT'S YA BOI WATCHMAN666 COMING AT YOU WITH A SPONSORED VIDEO" when looking.
At this point, I'd maybe wait to see what the official Google Wear OS watch will look and act like - purely because it's an OEM watch for Wear OS, "surely destined for greatness" (lol), but feature-for-feature, ounce-for-ounce, and kwhrs-to-kwhrs, the TicWatch Pro 3 GPS has really impressed me. I was waiting around for the Google Pixel Watch or whatever they'd name it, when I was gifted this one.
The only negative experience I had was Google Assistant (yes, on my watch) wouldn't speak out loud with my Pixel 2XL phone's language was set to English (Canada). I had to set it to English (US) for my watch to speak results to me.
It should also upgrade to WearOS 3 "in the second half of 2022" (no citation on this one)
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zBICoXBbLg - side-by-side comparison to SD4100 vs SD3100/SD2100
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmSarvfv3YY - Feature & Compatibility Comparison, GW3, TW3PG, Apple Watch 6
Best of luck in your travels
Meanwhile, things that are important to me are not addressed. For example, improving the Play Store relations & process, improving Java (desugaring?) or even just JUnit 5 support....
When I use my phone, I have one basic desire: keep the battery from degrading, so I don't have to buy another device. Yet, Google's 'Adaptive Battery' stuff is not flexible for even the most basic scenarios. And if you're developing, the phone will be plugged in 100% of the time and charged to 100%. I just want to stop charging at 80%, why does this have to be so hard?
So when Google showcases their A/R filter of highly rated chocolates during the keynote, I am not impressed, the phone can't even charge my battery the way I want (and lets not go into Photos app curated "best memories").
and even if I _wanted_ to implement support for larger screens, product will push back because the investment is not worth it for the few people who would use it. Same with foldables, good luck explaining why multi-week effort is worth it because some people might have a foldable. Half of _nice stuff_ on I/O _maybe_ will become relevant in couple of years
Anecdote: I tried to implement Paging3. First, the architecture was quite rigid and did not fit the way we handled our data. We spent days modifying the data and every component related to fit Paging. After all that work, we got it to work, only to find a "To do" error when using String IDs as pages as opposed to incrementing an integer.
Also if you had invested time into learning Paging2, you'd have to throw away all that effort with Paging3.
The more recent Material 3 is sexy, but the "easy" tools introduce a lot of ugly imperative boilerplate into my theme code. It smells hacky, as if it was not properly designed for this use case.
So my impression is that I/O is really just there to get alpha/canary testers.
It might be sexy, but I can't comprehend how Google can call it _stable_ when it doesn't even specify a text input layout component. Like, do apps not have user input?
Google I/O’s keynote (had to look it up) had a bunch of random announcements about their sites, like… automated transcriptions for youtube? Some map stuff? As an occasional user of their sites I really am not interested in any of this. I’m sure it matters to some people, but it isn’t universally interesting, I guess.
The closest Google comes to what Apple does is the Android and Pixel announcements, but Pixel hardware is just one option in the ecosystem rather than the whole thing, so I don’t think it necessarily attracts the same kind of attention.
Apple’s category creation resume:
- iPod
- iPhone
- iPad
- Apple Watch
- AirPods
- ARM Mac/Apple Silicon (still early but looks like an industry shift)
Apple’s successes above weren’t necessarily the first in the category, but they were the first to make the category significant. Watching the corresponding Apple keynotes for each of these launches was a window into the future. What’s the advantage of watching Google IO when they’ve rarely if ever dictated the future?
- The original Macintosh (first viable mouse/window based user interface for consumers)
- The first iMac (the end of the "beige box" era of computers)
- OS X in general (several new user interface paradigms never seen before like the dock, Exposé, GPU accelerated desktop rendering)
There were several maps before Google Maps but they didn't provide the smooth experience that Google Maps provides. Just like there were 100s of PDAs before iPhone but they didn't provide the smooth experience of iPhone.
Sure, the homepage of Altavista was a relic of the 90s. The SERP however wasn’t as radically different. If a minimal homepage is enough to be “category defining” to you, we can just agree to disagree and move on.
There’s a reason we “Google it” and don’t “altavista it”. ISTR altavista’s pitch over yahoo was that they indexed the entire web, they just couldn’t return meaningful results. Google could.
We probably verbed google rather than other products, because of that consistency. But at least my kid's peer group seems to have taken to using 'search up' as their verb... Kind of like look up.
https://digitalstateconsulting.com/knowledge-is-power/brief-...
> Phil Mui, the former Group Project Manager of Google Analytics, explains how Google’s initial version sought to democratise advanced web analytics to the masses. “The primary focus was to make sure that not only people who are willing to pay a million dollars or more on analytics products are able to get access to a very decent set of tools to understand the behaviours of online browsers”, he said at a conference in New York 2011.
> Google realised the infinite potential of data to create a better experience for web users. “By liberating this tool we could empower companies of all sizes to become smarter and more effective online”, remarked Muret. “We assigned considerable resources to our online solution and released it to the public for free [and]…has since grown beyond anything that we could have expected”.
"Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application. After additional acquisitions of a geospatial data visualization company and a real time traffic analyzer, Google Maps was launched in February 2005.[2] The service's front end utilizes JavaScript, XML, and Ajax. Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites,[3] and offers a locator for businesses and other organizations in numerous countries around the world. Google Map Maker allowed users to collaboratively expand and update the service's mapping worldwide but was discontinued from March 2017. However, crowdsourced contributions to Google Maps were not discontinued as the company announced those features would be transferred to the Google Local Guides program."
People used to call the iPhone the Apple Blackberry when it first came out.
Fitness watches were big before the Apple Watch (remember FitBit?).
ARM Mac is not the revelation that Apple fans think it is. It has literally zero impact outside of the Apple echo chamber, and the products based on the Apple chips are underwhelming, considering that Apple has full control of the hardware and software.
I guess if you're doing that weird Apple revisionist thing where you just ignore history, yes, Apple has "created" product categories that existed before Apple got into them, s the same way that Elon Musk "founded" Tesla and Al Gore "invented" the internet.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
There's a lot to be excited about with Apple. There's a lot to be excited about with Google. There's lots to criticize about both. We should be encouraging competition and that requires being critical of whichever side you land on. Not inventing some fake metrics.
Portable music players were huge before Apple got into the category. (And note that Apple copied the Creative Zen player form; Apple's "innovation" was the annoying scroll wheel it has long since abandoned.)
Smartphones were big before Apple got into the category. (Apple's innovation was marketing. Literally every other feature was copied from existing Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile dvices.)
Fitness watches were popular before Apple got into the category. Apple's innovation was making them cool again, in the same way that Timex made calculator watches and G-Force watches cool for a few years in the 1990s.
Low-power ARM chips were heavily used and gaining traction before Apple got into the category. Microsoft has supported ARM for almost half a decade now.
The only category that Apple actually made popular was the standalone tablet, which didn't meaningful exist because it was considered useless for creation/productivity and only good for consumption. (But on that note apparently Apple users excel at mindless consumption and don't care much for creation.)
It's only within the Apple echo chamber that these categories didn't exist, or weren't popular, before Apple entered the category.
I expected this to be the case 2 years ago, but since then it seems like Apple Silicon is legitimate competition. I don't think it's irrelevant. If they continue to pull forward, it will have an effect on the market outside of where Apple currently does business.
> products based on the Apple chips are underwhelming, considering that Apple has full control of the hardware and software
I can't speak for anyone else. I find them to be very impressive though, and it looks like they've started on an impressive trajectory. The hardware is exceeding my expectations by a wide margin.
I agree that the software could be better, but it could have been with or without their move to their own silicon. It's been in gradual decline for a while, I think.
The difference here is hardware vs. software. Android and ChromeOS devices are mostly not marketed as Google products (aside the Pixel stuff), so there's really not a need for big launch events. Apple's entire year can be made by a great launch, and no one does it better than Apple.
Can you say the same thing about Google I/O? Most people are not getting the stuff announced anytime soon.
The WWDC keynote is most relevant to most people, I/O is not. Google also announces a lot of stuff that goes nowhere, cool demos that don't amount to much. For example, in 2018 Google showcased Duplex, which is was an AI assistant that can call businesses and make reservations for you in a natural conversation with the employees. It was super cool but 4 years later, are Android users having their AI assistant do their management? I suspect, no. Google I/O product announcements are like a futursm festival, it gets old after the first time.
I feel Google gets some complaints, but there's nowhere near the outrage.
Google is not that much of an inescapable center point for a crowd of developers?
I think large "industry standard" communities are actually made up of hard to understand fragmented groups that kind of assume any conference topic is for one of the other fragments.
Unless my Android app has a demographic that’s biased heavily towards flagship phones, newly announced OS and ecosystem features just won’t be important to me for a while.
Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure the majority of my iOS users will be on iOS 16 by end of year, and a huge share more by next fall. So being attentive to what iOS 16 means for my app is more immediately important.
Edit: tbh I'm mostly an Apple user but I never watch video announcements for anything.
For one, I read the text summary and commentary on tech news sites which is faster and more informative.
And two: why would you bother with the marketing material from the vendor, be it in video or text form?
Google I/O keynote tries but doesn't get quite there.
You get iPhone X, WWDC is about that, then iPhone X+1, WWDC+1 is about that too, etc.
... is like the MCU of the developer world. Is kinda ironic, that MS is more about long-support but Apple deliver it better (eventually), in the sense that it continue building momentum.
Then, together with the continuity, it also trow some nice candy here and there, and if that catch (ie: Apple Watch, Payments, etc), then you see about it in WWDC+1.
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In the other hand, Google is like the DC: Each installment is only loosely connected to THEIR "brand" but it not create the momentum that make developers confident about putting passion on certain stuff. Alone each thing is interesting, but it not create the feel you actually need to continue about that...
Is like the video game world: If each game a company launch is "different", then each game a company launch needs to be great.
Instead, Apple launch something, at first interesting but probably considered not that big of a deal (like iPod), then iterate, it become MORE interesting (but: Without requiere EACH LAUNCH to be massively interesting) and somewhere along the line you get caught in the wave, and your next time? You are already hooked.
As a professional, you care about what pays your salary. And that is iOS.
My /impression/ has been that the individual developer sessions are much better and more clearly presented.
The other aspect - for developers - is Apple has like 40 years of being an actual OS developer, and recognizes that ABI stability matters. Even when APIs are superseded, the old APIs remain for many release cycles - not to MS levels of insanity, but not far off. As a result the APIs are designed for longevity, and considerable thought is given to ensuring that APIs should be sufficiently forward thinking to avoid the need for frequently replacing APIs with new APIs that do the same basic thing. A result of that is the developer sessions have value for more than single OS release - and remain available on the WWDC site for many year.
Apple makes its sales events (WWDC is a sales event) feel like something big, an occasion, something special to look forward to, like the revealing of a secret to the in-crowd.
This focus on the spectacle, the presentation and the perception, is a huge part of the company’s DNA.
People love this. Google is pretty terrible at it. Like Microsoft, they are getting better by watching Apple but showboating is not in Google’s DNA.
This isn’t just about Apple presentations. It’s all through the products and everything the company presents externally (internal tools are sometimes ugly and shit though).
Go back and look at the release of the original iMac; an outdated computer with a shoddy OS, built into a curvy, shiny, colorful case… people literally lined up to buy them. I refused on the grounds that I knew what was in that box… yet I still want one today. Mmmm shiny…
WWDC is the same. It’s not an accident. They think and work hard on making it happen.
One problem is that Google doesn’t stick with or commit to most things, except Search and e-mail. So Google products just aren’t that interesting.
Another is time to release. Apple doesn’t generally announce things (with a few exceptions) unless they are close to release. It’s no fun to get excited about something and then wait a year or two.
I disagree that Google’s products aren’t as interesting. They have great tech. I’ve been very interested in the Pixel phone and other Android related products. But Google has different drivers.
With Apple, everything is aligned on the show. They put everything they have into making stuff we want to buy and use. It’s like a singular goal.
Pixel could be great. It was getting there —I switched and loved it in the Pixel 2 / iPhone 7 era. But they are not committed enough to making it the best for the consumer.
I don’t use AI/ML on my apps.
I don’t use any Google products besides Gmail or Chrome.
I am an Android dev and I am more interested in Jetbrain’s Kotlin releases.
It is difficult to understand why people see this behavior over and over again and still express surprise and disappointment. This is Google's nature - it is in their DNA.
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I don't watch either shows, but... and I can't tell you why, but reading the summary articles of "Apple showed X and Y" is still more interesting to me than ANYTHING Google has unveiled in the last 10 years. I'm a very disappointed Android user of roughly 12-13 years (my main point is that the damn phones never get updates after 1-3 years) and they never bring out anything exciting. I mean, I don't find the stuff that Apple unveils exciting (except the M1, that was something new) but I can hardly imagine anything less interesting than Google products.
Sure, many WWDC updates are like "number behind 'iPhone' goes up" but at least it's something of a cycle and you can't really escape it if your friends are talking about it. There seems to be at least some sort of innovation. Maybe it's also a little "hey this sounds kinda nice, wouldn't it be cool..." (typical grass is greener on the other side).
But in retrospect I couldn't actually tell you any meaningful feature in Android that I found really good in a new version. It has always somehow worked for the basic things I do. Also one main point is that they have a non-convoluted lineup. Even I, as someone who should have zero clue, could summarize the current things in two sentences. Google? I have no idea. I/O feels as if this was WWDC + AWS Summit + half of E3.
If you see something at an Apple keynote you know exactly when that's landing. If you see something at a Google conference, it's much less clear when you can take advantage of it, if at all.
>Is it a failure on Google's leadership to put on a good show?
It is a failure on Google’s leadership to create good products that people (developers and users alike) can be enthusiastic about.
Google. When was the last time you remember anybody being excited about anything Google did? The biggest success Google has had is turning Google into a verb that's synonymous with web search - whether people are using Google, DDG or Bing they're "Googling" something. Even Go and Kubernetes are quite old ideas now and Samsung is Android in most consumer's minds. Seems like Google's heyday was 10 years ago.
Netflix. They solved the problem of the uninterrupted video streaming to tens of millions of subscribers. A lot of modern DevOps practices came from Netflix. Now everyone and his brother has a streaming service. It's no longer a technology problem but a content problem, and Disney is the king of content. Why would you want to work at Netflix today?
Facebook. I'd be concerned about no one ever hiring me if I had Facebook on my CV. Even so, like the other companies in FAANG they seem to have peeked.
Amazon. There are still a lot of problems to be solved in logistics and distribution, not to mention there's a lot of work in their AWS services. Amazon seems like a place to work where you're still solving relevant problems. Their ultimate goal is to be the Walmart of online shopping and to do it cheaper than their brick-and-mortar rivals can.
Apple. At least you know there will always be incremental mods to be made to Mac OS, iOS, iPad OS, Watch OS and TV OS! You might even get the chance to work on the "next gadget" OS! Or some other service. Seems better for the hardware-minded than for us software folks.
Bottom line - seems like the FAANG companies, with the exception of Amazon and possibly Apple, have lost their bite! We came to the conclusion that Microsoft is doing more interesting things today in 2022 than most of the FAANG companies are. We also all know people working for small, unheard-of companies that are doing really interesting things.
Back to your question - why does WWDC get 10x more views than Google I/O? Because it's not aimed at a technical audience and they work to make it as entertaining as possible considering you're dealing with a bunch of geeks doing the presentations.
With Google, products are usually beta quality when released, and it's a crapshoot as to whether they'll ever release a fully functional version of the product before they cancel it. Or worse, Google will release a functional product and their horrific internal promotion system will lead to the removal of functionality so that some idiot engineer can justify a promotion for reprogramming the product in a new language.
WWDC keynote has both to some degree.
Both have gotten painfully sterile and wooden over the years.
Loads of people might buy the pixel 19s when they come out, but nobody will lust over them the way that Apple has taught it's fanbase to do for it's products over the last 2 decades.
Apple has always depended on the products mostly selling the selves. It just beggars belief that they’ve somehow deluded people into thinking the devices they use every day are great when they’re actually crap. Maybe people actually do genuinely just like them?
Sometimes they royally screw the pooch, but it becomes a talking point/memeable (the $1000 monitor stand, "courage" to remove a socket etc)
Google I/O announces.... the next rehash of the sms messsager, of and btw they're deprecating the one they made last year...
Ok maybe not 10x but the point still remains.
WWDC on the other hand is watched by a wider range of people that go beyond just apple devs like techies, nerds and devs from other ecosystems.
I don’t know the numbers here. But I would assume, part of the pull is that people consider Apple products to be luxury items. Hence maybe this is attractive to participants?
Gmail: not really, web based freemailers are a dime and a dozen and the only thing Gmail brought to the table was more storage space.
Youtube: was neither created not announced by Google.
Errr. No? Storage was a game changer, but its search and spam filtering was miles ahead of yahoo/hotmail/etc at the time.
Also 10x better web client than anything else that was free. There's a reason people were selling invites after all.